22nd Day of Easter, Sunday May 3: Acts 12:20-25

This brief reading gives the culmination of Herod’s persecution. He’s starving out the folks in the ports of Tyre and Sidon, in a time of famine. His subordinate Blastus mediates a begging session, in which those Galilean Gentiles hailed Herod as a god, appealing to his vanity for food aid. God strikes him dead. Bullies and political persecutions come and go, is the message – don’t buckle.

This rewriting of history claims that once Herod was dead, the Jerusalem church regathered, so that Barnabas and Saul having delivered their relief from Antioch can pick up John Mark (whose mother’s home was Peter’s refuge after jailbreak) and head back for another ‘mission’ to Antioch. These last verses are a bit of an awkward seam or segue as Acts tries to wrestle a historical narrative to fit a hypothesis of Jerusalem as the centre and source church from which mission reached to Judea, Galilee, and to the ends of the earth.

Is it possible that we’ve got a meta-narrative from colonial days that locates the centre and source of the faith in Europe, and subordinates missions in our ‘new world’ to the greater ‘old country’ authority of Rome, Canterbury, or Geneva? What about our other roots in Orthodoxy – and our own legitimacy in our context? We used to pay preachers more in big churches if they were trained in Europe, and had an English, Scottish, or even Irish accent. What’s the ‘real’ church and a norm for ministers for you now?